This challenge is produced by GirlieOnTheEdge with the following simple rules:
Write 6 Sentences. No more. No less.
Use the current week’s prompt word – PATH
Click here to hear the author read his words:
A While
If you leave Glasgow heading west, then swing northwards along the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, you travel through places like Crianlarich and, eschewing the Oban road, wild Rannoch Moor, ghost-ridden Glencoe and eventually picturesque Glenfinnan, probably my favourite spot in Scotland, and you might realise that during the past couple of hours things have not been quite the same, that people are more relaxed, and the pace of life is somewhat gentler.
This is because you are now in the West Highlands, where the very passing of time is regarded differently, where there are, in fact, only three measurements of said time, which I will attempt to illustrate by asking you to imagine yourself at a bus stop in, say, Drumnadrochit, asking a local when the next vehicle of transport will appear.
It’ll just be a minute, is the first possible response, accompanied by an encouraging smile and a nodding head, indicating that your wait will in all probability not extend past the next major mealtime, and that, with a little patience, you should be on your merry way relatively soon, and certainly before darkness drifts along.
Aye, it’ll likely be along in a bit, is the slightly less optimistic answer, usually with a vague wrinkling of the brow, suggesting that although it is confidently expected that the aforementioned bus will appear, you might take the opportunity to attend to any call of nature and perhaps partake of significant sustenance in the interim.
Och, that could be a while, emphasised by breath being sucked in through teeth, tells you, with great clarity, that you will in all probability die here of starvation or old age unless you take alternative action, such as hiring a unicorn or, less romantically, a car.
The upside to all this is that, before you succumb to the pull of ‘civilisation’ and call your nearest friend in Edinburgh, London, or Milwaukee to come and fetch you, you have the potential to briefly follow an alternative path, one of enlightenment, through life, to make any number of new friends, to discover the joys of single Malts, and perhaps, if you are of a musical bent, even to learn to play a pibroch.
Sitting at the bus stop, adjusts her scarf and reaches in her hiking pack for the thermos of tea, and sleeve of biscuits to share.
Delightful!
An interesting way to mark the ‘time’. Though the bigger question is, how do you hire a unicorn? 🤔
Your first sentence took me past my daughter’s lovely cottage and into an area I’ve become to love and know so well. I feel a not-so-wee dram of Glengoyne coming on!
With time there being what it is, i do believe i want to stay at least long enough to make a new friend or two.
I like the thought of “hiring a unicorn” as an alternative rather than wait for that bus.
Dude! Put me right there… at the bus stop!
Your Six this week is surely representative of what we all aspire to, Sixistically-speaking*, that is.
*not a ‘real’ term in rhetoric
We should all spend a little time in a place such as the West Highlands or…anywhere else “where the very passing of time is regarded differently”. Would do a body good.
Got to admit, I’d probably never get the hang of the pibroch 😉
Thank you for this side trip Six, ceayr.
Vintage, you funny funny man. You’ve certainly made we want to visit that Drumkit place, but not by bus. 😉 Reminded me of a tourism campaign I helped with for an Indigenous community in Australia’s north-west, which billed itself as ‘The Land That Forgot Time’.
Ahhh, you’ve done it again–a wonderful 6 which captivated me entirely!! By the way, I had a flash of nostalgia re The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond–when I was a “wee” girl in elementary school, part of the curriculum was music (not that I could sing then, or now), and we learned the ballad, I guess it’s a ballad. I remember bits of it, “ye take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland a’fore ye”. Something like that, anyway–I can hear the lovely melody in my head…and I think there was something about “me and my true love (will never meet again…on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond)”. Let me know if I’ve recalled this the slightest bit accurately😉
Delightful peek at a place which literally seems “Timeless”. Bravo and thank-you!
This one is delightful and gently funny and made me smile.
You’ve captured the people and the different attitude to life so perceptively that you make me want to travel to these places with the names that roll on the tongue and in the throat, and wander among the locals, just passing the time of day… and sampling the malts. Saor Alba!